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Ryk Orn Raekaar, Lt. Cmdr.
Lt. Cmdr. Ryk Orn Raekaar, "Ricky" to his close friends and shipmates, is the Chief Engineer aboard the USS Twilight NCC - 74413. A Tellarite, Ricky is a talented engineer by nature and his native culture. Ricky and Capt. Harker went to Starfleet Academy together, and served together throughout their careers. Both served their Cadet Cruise together aboard the USS Discovery under Capt. Ann Potrikos, and later aboard the Galaxy-class USS El Dorado under Capt. Jose Sanchez. While going for his bridge qualification test, Ricky discovered that at tactical, he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn from the inside! (i.e., real-life Ricky playinilg the PC kept rolling terribly low with the dice.) Ricky was then assigned to engineering, while Jaryd Harker, MD, was naturally assigned to Sickbay. A freak accident with an experimental coaxial warp drive called the "Lattice Drive" stranded the El Dorado in the Gamma Quadrant, 6 months from the Idrian-end of the Bajoran Wormhole. With 23% of the crew dead, most of them engineers, and also the chief medical officer who was down in Main Engineering treating the dying, both young officers were immediately appointed as department heads; Ryk Orn Raekaar as Chief Engineer, and Harker--the last surviving doctor--as Chief Medical Officer. When the El-Dorado limped back home, the promotions were made permanent, and both officers became full lieutenants. Further testing of the ill-conceived Lattice-Drive left the El-Dorado in M-33, a "galaxy far, far, away" faced with triangular-shaped starships belonging to their Imperial Star Forces. Fortunately, the local culture in M-33 was some two centuries behind Federation technology--their "turbo-lasers" didn't even penetrate the El-Dorado's navigational deflectors, to say nothing of her combat shields. Capt. Sanchez elected to explore this strange galaxy. Ricky, piloting a Type-8 shuttlecraft down to a planet, crash-landed. Desperately needing to join the other Away Team that had beamed down on the opposite side of that world, Ricky traded the mostly-destroyed shuttlecraft for a speeder bike, and made it back in time. When El-Dorado returned to Earth, Admiral Uhura had a fit. "You traded a Starfleet shuttlecraft for a primative speeder bike...and left the shuttle's computer core intact?!? You boys had better go back, and do not return unless you get that shuttlecraft and its computer BACK! Am I clear, Captain Sanchez? Am I clear, Lieutenant Raekaar?" When El-Dorado returned, the calculations were slightly off, and the ship arrived 20 years after her initial First Contact. The Imperial Star Destroyers were armed with phasers and photon torpedoes. ("Why would Lord Vader need a Death Star, when a single photon torpedo will rip away a planet's atmosphere in minutes?") El-Dorado was forced to slingshot around a local sun, go back in time to just after Lt. Raekaar's screw-up, and beam the entire shuttlecraft aboard. The starship then returned home after another scientific expedition or two. For this inadvertent violation of the Prime Directive, Lt. Raekaar went to the bottom of the promotion list, while Dr. Harker became a full commander as well as a line officer. Harker was still friends with Ricky, and they were sent on a special mission for Starfleet Intelligence 3 years later, to USS Twilight.